


If You Have to Buy the Farm, Do it Literally

by cailures



Category: Rome
Genre: Alternate Universe – Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-16 16:32:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4632240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cailures/pseuds/cailures
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vorenus survives being wounded at the end of S2. He and Pullo settle down to raise the kids and accidentally fall in love. </p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Have to Buy the Farm, Do it Literally

**Author's Note:**

> For #11.
> 
> Grate thanks to my beta for helping tame my transcontinental sentences. You know who you are! 

Vorenus is stubborn as an ox, especially when he has something to live for, and it’s not like Pullo missed the way he looked at his daughters the first time they appeared at his bedside. But somehow, it’s still surprising when Vorena the Elder stumbles out the door of his room without looking where she’s going and bumps right into Pullo, cushioned by the armful of sheets she’s holding. 

She looks up at him, blank with shock, and for a moment he assumes the obvious: Vorenus has died. He’s about to squeeze her hand and tell her he’ll take care of everything, when she opens her mouth. 

“He’s going to live,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. “I think he’s going to live.”

And he does. The fever breaks. He eats broth, and then soup, and then bread. He demands that Pullo help him sit up, and then stand and take a few halting steps around the room. At first, Pullo isn’t sure whether the elder Vorena will stay in the house: it’s so much less complicated to forgive a man on his deathbed, and for the first few days, she seems to take the recovery as a sort of catastrophe in itself. 

He tries to give her space, and it’s not exactly a hardship to sit up with his friend and goad him into resigned disapproval of his efforts to teach Caesarion dice and drinking games. Vorenus asks about his daughters, apparently trusting Pullo’s judgement more than his own, but he rarely says much about them until one afternoon when Pullo arrives to find him fingering the edge of a new blanket. 

“My younger daughter wove this,” he says. 

“Yes.”

“She has a particular way of working in the ends of her yarn.” He holds it up – Pullo can’t see anything unusual about it, but he’s willing to take it on faith. “She showed me once. I didn’t know what to say. She’s so clever at all these things; she makes such tiny little stitches.” He shakes himself, and puts the blanket down. It looks like it takes effort. 

Pullo cups his hand over Vorenus’. “I think you’re supposed to say that it’s pretty.”

“Yes well, if either of them ever speak to me again, I’ll bear that in mind.” The bitterness in his voice is still raw around the edges, and Pullo takes pity on him and changes the subject. 

He leaves the room to find the elder Vorena slumped against the wall. She’s holding a bowl of porridge in one hand; the other is curled into a fist against her mouth, her fingers slick with silent tears. He takes the bowl so she won’t break it – Vorenus is asleep anyway – and leads her downstairs to sit down. 

“Stitches,” she says bitterly. “Stitches. He was a monster, like a myth – he was gone for so long, and then this stranger came home, and – and killed my mother for daring to want to outlive her dead husband. And he cares about my sister’s stitches and that ridiculous way she weaves in her ends.” 

Pullo scratches awkwardly at the back of his neck. With any of his male friends, or hell, even with a boy her age, Pullo would already be hauling him out into the street in the direction of the nearest tavern. He eyes her critically. “You’re old enough to get drunk, aren’t you?”

“I’m almost fifteen,” Vorena shoots back, and her expression makes her look very like her father.

They don’t get drunk. They get mildly tipsy, and Vorena bests him at four out of five games of darts. When she wakes up the next morning, not even a slight hangover can disguise how much better she feels. 

**

That still leaves the problem of what to do with a miraculously-recovered ex-enemy of Octavian and the hypothetically dead Caesarion; neither of them can stay cooped up in the house forever. Octavian is settling his veterans all over Italy, but as much as Pullo might like to settle down in a military colony, it’s far too risky. “We could disappear into the streets,” Pullo offers. “Rome can swallow up a few more fugitives. 

But it’s Vorena who speaks up, to everyone’s surprise and from the look on her face, to her own surprise as well. “No,” she says, “it’s filthy here. Father won’t recover in this. He needs fresh air and streets that aren’t ankle-deep in garbage.” She lifts her chin, suddenly looking years older than the girl he’d approached only a few weeks ago to tell her that her father was dying. 

Pullo raises his eyebrows, but he nods without comment. They can disappear in the Empire just as well as Rome, a few tiny fish in a very large sea. He knows a man who knows a man, and in a week they’re slipping onto a ship that will take them to Hispania.

**

They arrive just before planting time, and it only takes Pullo a few days of searching to find a farm far enough from town that they’ll have a reasonable amount of privacy. It’s small; Octavian’s reward would have bought a bigger one, but there’s only so much farm that one able-bodied man can tend with the assistance of a scrawny boy and an injured friend. Vorenus’ wound hasn’t crippled him, but it does slow him down. He bends over awkwardly, holding onto the side of a cart, the rail of a fence. Pullo’s shoulder. When he sits in a jolting ox cart for too long, he grows silent and stiff with pain, and Pullo has to force him down on some pretext or other to take a break. 

They make a fine little group of misfits, and they have their hands full trying to learn to run their new farm. The isolation is the hardest part – after being surrounded by a legion of drinking buddies, Pullo is suddenly thrust out into the countryside to play at a bizarre version of settling down on the farm. But there’s a town only a few miles away, and none of the locals seem to know or care much about politics in Rome, and gradually they settle in. 

**

He isn’t there to see Vorenus arguing with his older daughter, but when he tramps into the house, knocking mud off his boots from the chicken coop, he sees her banging dishes in the wash-tub with unusual ferocity, her mouth pressed into a flat line. 

“Where’s – ”

“Down the hill, working on the fence.” 

The sun is oppressive as he walks down, dry grass prickling around his ankles and insects buzzing around his face and hands. It’s the hottest part of the afternoon. He finds Vorenus collapsed beside a line of fencepost-holes, his face pale and set, with cold sweat trickling down his forehead. He’s breathing shallowly, one hand wrapped around his torso to curl over his wound. 

Pullo rolls his eyes and hauls one of Vorenus’ arms over his shoulder, half-dragging him into the shade of a tree and tugging off his boots. It’s marginally cooler in the shade, and they sit in silence for a few minutes staring out over Vorenus’ handiwork. 

The fence starts out unremarkable, but as it continues, the stakes get closer and closer together until it turns into a miniature camp palisade of three-foot fence posts. It’s built to perfect military standards, a useless waist-high wall defending nobody from nothing. Lucius Vorenus: officially dead, unofficially retired, and still trying to run to the army to escape from himself. 

For a few minutes, the only sound is Vorenus’ pained breathing. He looks at the useless palisade hopelessly and coughs out a laugh. “How do I talk to her?” 

Pullo takes a deep breath and puffs it out. The problem isn’t what to say; it’s that Vorenus is simply incapable of saying it, at least in his current state. “You know,” he says conversationally, “I think you’d feel better after a good fuck.”

Vorenus gives him a horrified look, and it takes Pullo a minute to figure out what he’s thinking. 

“Oh by all the gods, I’m not saying you should fuck your daughter.” 

“Then what?”

Pullo thunks his head back against the tree helplessly. “You can’t treat everyone like soldiers in a legion. You have to learn some other way to talk to them, and at this point your cock is probably better at that than your mouth.” 

Vorenus’ expression darkens from skeptical to disgusted, and Pullo talks over his attempt to interrupt. “I can’t explain it. Just find a woman you like and enjoy yourself. Make her enjoy herself. It might help pull the stick out of your ass; that’s all.” 

“I don’t want a woman”

“Well a man, then, if you like.”

“Or a man either, Gods. Not all of us can look for meaning in the inside of a whorehouse.” 

“So you’d rather look for it in the memory of an army that took your loyalty and fucked you up the ass with it?” Pullo nods at the row of stakes. 

Vorenus’ face closes off, and he looks away. Pullo lets him be for a few minutes before he hauls himself back up to his feet and offers one hand. “Come on. You need some water, and I need something stronger.”

Vorenus staggers up with a wince, and shoots a filthy look at the row of stakes. “I think I might need something stronger, too.”

**

Unless both of his daughters are also illegitimate – dubious, seeing how they both take after so many infuriating aspects of his character – Vorenus must not be impotent. But he seems determined to act like it, glowering censoriously every time Pullo cracks filthy jokes about the cats or wonders out loud about the chickens. 

Pullo, on the other hand, decides to take his own advice. The next time he winds up in town, he treats himself to one of the nicer brothels. The girl is wearing a flame-orange dress that brings out the rich dark brown of her hair. When he slides it off, her skin is milky and smooth, freckles dotted on her arms and the bridge of her nose. She has unbelievably perfect tits, and he has her ride him so he can watch them bounce on her chest, dusty-brown nipples against pale skin.

“Take your time,” he says, sliding one hand up the curve of her ass. “I’m enjoying the view.” She laughs, and it slides up into a moan when he slips his thumb between her legs, his fingers splayed out on her stomach. Just as he suspected, she’s even prettier when the pleasure isn’t faked. 

He remembers explaining this particular part of the female anatomy to Vorenus so long ago he almost can’t imagine it, and grins wickedly at the thought of giving him a practical demonstration, Vorenus’ face while he watched this girl moan and buck her hips into his hand, the way he’d start out looking as stern as he always does only to feel his control eroded by arousal – 

Pullo comes without meaning to, his legs shaking helplessly against the mattress, and then rolls the girl under him to slide two fingers back up where his cock had been, flicking his thumb faster over her clit until she clenches around him and screams with pleasure. 

“I like you,” she says, with a sated grin. “Come back sometime.” 

It feels good, warm and humming under his skin for the rest of the day. He feels stupidly awkward at the sight of Vorenus setting at the kitchen table when he finally makes it home, but there’s plenty of room to hide it in the crush of all this other getting-back-from-town chores, and the next morning, the feeling is almost gone. 

**

He doesn’t go back, though. At first he tells himself it’s because the harvest season has started in earnest and he’s out working with Caesarion and Vorenus as long as they have light to work by. Sometimes the girls join them, too. The elder Vorena in particular is a surprisingly strong fieldworker for a girl bred to an entirely different sort of life: she’s thin, but she works with dogged persistence that would put some soldiers Pullo’s known to shame. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Pullo sees Vorenus catch her by the shoulder as she’s hanging up a harness around the side of the barn. He says something to her, too soft to hear, and then makes as if he’s about to clap her on the shoulder but changes his mind at the last minute and awkwardly pats her on the hand instead before hastily retreating towards the house. Vorena looks down at her hand and then up at her father’s back, and the surprise in her expression is certainly the pleasant kind. 

Pullo ducks back behind the barn wall and doesn’t bother to smother his smile.

After the harvest is in, though, he has no excuse – and without the exhaustion of the constant labor, the dreams start. He dreams about fucking a woman together, their fingers sliding together over her cunt as he shows Vorenus how to make her fist her hands in the sheets and moan. He wakes up and watches Vorenus’ fingers around his spoon, tying a knot, holding a knife, and looks away with the paranoia of guilty conscience. 

The weather turns cold at night, and he takes to spending time in the barn, finding endless chores to do out there by himself, or teaching Caesarion to ride a horse and fight with a wooden sword. 

He goes into town again to buy various necessaries, with the vague idea of finding another girl, or maybe a boy, someone who wouldn’t know him at all. He buys three new harness-buckles, and a pair of tongs, wool for the girls, and boots for Caesarion, who is growing three times faster than any weed Pullo has ever seen and eating to match. 

And then he’s free, but he finds himself wandering the town, strangely disinterested in sex. He stops by a bar, has a few glasses of wine, and plays a desultory game of dice with three of the locals, but somehow he finds himself itchy to head back to the farm right away. At first he thinks he’s just anxious to get started on a patch of trees that need chopping before it snows, out in the northwest corner, but when he gets back to the house, the feeling disappears and suddenly he’s perfectly happy to stay in. 

The elder Vorena is trying to teach Caesarion to bake bread while her sister watches them from over her spindle, smirking quietly at his unsuccessful efforts not to get flour all over his face. Vorenus sits close to the fire, a harness stretched out on his legs for mending. His hands slide over the leather with an easy competence, and Pullo’s eyes slide straight to them, but he guiltily snaps them away.

“I brought your buckles.” He rummages through his packages and squats down next to Vorenus to take a look at the harness. But just as he’s about to ask how it’s going, he sees Vorenus’ face shut down and realizes he’s come home unusually late still smelling like wine and a seedy tavern, and there’s a very obvious assumption to make. 

It’s not Vorenus’ disapproval of his theoretical sexual habits. It’s the fact that this time he gives a damn, and Pullo abruptly realizes that he’s gone and done exactly what he can’t do if he’s going to stay on good terms with his friend. 

“I’m going to go get a start on those trees,” he says roughly, and barely remembers to drop the rest of his packages on the table before he grabs the axe and heads out. At least the hard work offers the same dream-numbing benefits as the harvest season did, and Pullo finds himself wishing the trees would grow back overnight so he wouldn’t have to risk finding out what he might dream about now. 

**

Vorenus might be an idiot, but he’s not that big of an idiot. He corners Pullo the next evening while he’s trekking back up from the barn to the house. It’s not quite frosted over, but the frost is coming, and the sky is sharp and cold. 

“Have I offended you?”

“No.” Pullo shrugs off the hand on his shoulder and tries to start up again, but Vorenus holds him back. 

“You’ve been hiding in make-work projects for weeks.”

“What, aren’t you happy I wasn’t out doing something more enjoyable?” 

“Gods,” growls Vorenus in frustration, and shoves him roughly up against a tree with a violent, graceless kiss. He’s smaller than Pullo, but he’s fast even with the old wound, and more importantly, surprise is very clearly on his side. 

Oh. Pullo revises his mental estimation: Vorenus really is that big of an idiot and more, but Pullo is an even bigger one. “You could ask first,” he says, but he can’t quite stop the sloppy grin spreading across his face, and when Vorenus makes to turn away with equal parts humiliation and rage twisted into his face, Pullo grabs him back and hauls him in for another kiss by the front of his tunic.


End file.
